(Kenneth Anderson) Julian Barnes has a good story in today’s Wall Street Journal on the expanding and deepening boots on the ground role of US special operations forces in the Pakistan border region. It is well sourced and reported, and overall points to a deeper cooperation with the Pakistan military. I wanted to flag a couple of things. First, the special ops units are going on aid missions, and as the article notes, they sometimes do so in civilian dress: The Special Operations teams join the aid missions only when commanders determine there is relatively little security risk, a…
NASA chief Charles Bolden, an impressive former Marine Corps major general and astronaut, recently waxed eloquent about his tripartite mission at the space agency he was entrusted with by President Obama. Strangely, his third “and perhaps foremost” objective is apparently “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” This, Bolden explains, is part of the president’s “Cairo Initiative,” a reification of the speechmaking he offered to the Muslim world last summer in Cairo…
Syrian president Bashar Assad has declared that the Obama administration’s failure to facilitate change in the Middle East shows that it is weak. Assad made this statment during a visit to Latin America, which has become a region of interest to both Assad and Iranian president Ahmadinejad. Assad’s statement provides further evidence of the dangers that arise from Obama’s obsession with forcing Israeli concessions in the name of “peace.” Try as he might, Obama will not be able to force enough concessions to satisfy the Palestinians, and by extension Assad. Thus, he enables Assad and other enemies of the U.S. to portray Obama as weak and ineffectual. And the claim is plausible because Obama…
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Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez (R) speaks as Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad listens during a ceremony where the two countries signed an economic agreement at Miraflores Palace in Caracas June 26, 2010. Assad is on a rare visit to Latin America aimed at extending Syria’s diplomatic reach after emerging from Western isolation, and attracting investment for his country’s ageing infrastructure. ( Reuters ) Leftist hero and Marxist Hugo Chavez lashed out at “genocidal” government of Israel and the United States this weekend. The AP reported: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez…
Tonight in Manhattan, Oliver Stone premiered South of the Border, his new documentary and love song to the Latin American Left, before a small audience of friends. The film lionizes leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Raul Castro, among others. Before the screening, National Review Online spoke with Stone about his politics. “The American economy has been geared to the concept of the military-industrial complex,” Stone says. He believes the…
The Venezuelan people are forced to suffer through a marathon of Hugo Chavez appearances on their own television sets. Anything less than total adoration of the weekly host of “Aló Presidente” is severely punished . So with all this unwanted overexposure to the overbearing El Jefe, is it any wonder that Venezuelans are somewhat less than enthusiastic about shelling out their money to watch yet more homage paid to Chavez by filmmaker Oliver Stone…
Michael Ledeen, having been right all along (see, e.g., Accomplice to Evil and The Iranian Time Bomb — takes to his Pajamas blog to consider the “grim news that geopolitical ‘experts’ are thinking deeply about what to do after Iran gets the bomb.” After extending kudos to excellent essays on the folly of “containment” by Cliff , Mike Anton , and Bret Stephens , Michael observes that by settling into an “Iran-with-nukes” framework, our…
Odd little news story about Fidel Castro and Israel. Castro said, “The hatred felt by the state of Israel against the Palestinians is such that they would not hesitate to send the one and a half million men, women and children of that country to the crematoria where millions of Jews of all ages were exterminated by the Nazis.” Castro doesn’t deny the Holocaust? That’s a little backward of him. I’m not sure he’s in the progressive vanguard anymore. He went on to say, “It would seem that the Fuehrer’s swastika is today …
Another report from TPM Reader JE … I am an ex-minerals exploration geologist. My experience was in Latin America and Northern Canada, but I sent the following to some friends early this morning: “Hard to tell how earthshaking this is, given its propaganda value, the lack of publicly released data, and apparently sparse on-the-ground investigation. “According to my pal [ redacted ], who worked as a geologist for the World Bank in Afghanistan until a year or two before the Soviet invasion, Russian exploration there…
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What a shock. Far left rockers Carlos Santana, Willie Nelson and the Mexican group Mana have joined together to record songs in support of illegal immigrants. Carlos Santana sports his Che T-shirt at the Oscars. The Washington Post reported, via FOX Nation : Four summers ago, a handful of Spanish-speaking radio disc jockeys helped bring hundreds of thousands of Latino marchers to the streets of Los Angeles and other cities to support immigration reform. Now, in what is partly a sign of the growing clout of U.S. Latinos both as voters and cultural consumers, a number of prominent artists, both Latino and non-Latino, are urging a boycott of Arizona’s controversial new statute …
